Housing and the Justification of School Segregation

Abstract

The intense attack on court-ordered busing rests largely on the public belief that the courts are artificially interfering with normal neighborhoods and communities. A central premise in the early Supreme Court decisions was, however, that the courts were attempting to correct violations with deep roots in both school and housing discrimination. When the Court later decided to limit and then to permit termination of desegregation, however, fundamentally different conclusions about housing were relied on-that housing segregation simply happened for some unknowable reason or that it was a natural force, separate from schools, that courts could do nothing about. The changing conception of housing, often reached with little or no empirical basis, has provided a principal grounds for judicial acceptance of segregated education. To determine whether or not court-ordered desegregation in urban areas is needed, justifiable, and feasible, courts must reach decisions about urban residential segregation and its relationship to schools. The radical change in the Supreme Court's understanding of the relationship between school and housing segregation between the early 1970s and the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley' decision, which brought an end to significant increases in desegregation and locked in the isolation of minority students in the metropolitan North, provided a key element in the justification of a constitutional policy that made desegregation a right without a remedy in the metropolitan North, where virtually all major cities have large majorities of nonwhite students who attend segregated and inferior schools. The Milliken decision, blocking desegregation in the North, and the 1991 and 1992 decisions, Board of Education v. Dowell2 and Freeman v. Pitts,3 permitting resegregation of southern school districts, rest to a considerable degree on court findings about housing segregation, theories that changed drastically as the courts moved from requiring all-out urban desegregation within school